Come August, the skies over the DCU will fill with heroes, villains, and just about everyone in between, courtesy of Justice, the new 12-issue, bi-monthly series coming from Alex Ross, Jim Krueger and Doug Braithwaite. Previously, the trio had teamed for various Earth X projects at Marvel, telling a story of possible future for the Marvel Universe, and allowing Ross to redesign virtually the entire Marvel Universe to his liking.

While not offering the opportunity to redesign known characters for a future age, Justice is no less an undertaking, especially given Ross’ thumbnail description of the story: “Superhuman war. The superhuman war.”

Or – in easier terms, though it elicits a groan from Ross as he knows he’s become somewhat stereotyped due to his love for the team and era of DC: The Superfriends vs. the Legion of Doom: To the Death.

Ross co-plots with Krueger, provides covers, and paints over Braithwaite’s pencils, resulting in a look that’s distinctly Ross’, but at the same time, with a freshness peeking through.

We sat down with Ross to talk about the series, and in today’s part one of a two-part interview, we hit upon the series’ origin.

Newsarama: So, as you’ve said, this is in essence, a follow-up Truth and Justice, your Treasury-sized JLA book you did with Paul Dini, but it goes off on its own direction?

Alex Ross: Kinda. We basically did your classic seemingly never-changing lineup of JLA members from the Silver Age, which I count as going into the ‘70s by a fair bit. In this thing, we’re picking up with the greatest lineup of Silver Age villains against the greatest lineup of Silver Age heroes. It’s the creative extension of the things that I’ve always wanted to do, but had never really found the right moment to do them in.

NRAMA: Why not? What makes now the right time?

AR: Well, I’d done a big one with Kingdom Come, and after that, superhero/super-human wars seemed to be dominating comics throughout the ‘90s. I wanted to break away from that after Kingdom Come, to focus on the inherent, intrinsic value of these individual icons as superheroes, which is what led to the Treasury books with Paul. That built up all the way to JLA, where once I was doing that many characters again, I caught the desire to do a regular superhero story. Finally, I can give people what I can end up feeling that they want from me, which is a comic book much closer to something like Kingdom Come.

NRAMA: The all out fight between good an evil?

AR: Right - the all-out fight, many more characters, and many more elements where I’m touching upon continuity that you recognize with the iconic characters. For instance, there was no Marvel family in the Shazam book I did. There was no Lois or Jimmy in the Superman book. You’re getting all that plus more in this – you’re getting all those extended kind of characters making their appearances throughout this – some greater than others, obviously, but the idea is that the Justice League’s lives are not finite to just that grouping, but also include all the people they’re involved with.

NRAMA: So who are we talking about? Everyone?

AR: Everyone. From Robin with Batman to the Teen Titans, and more. You’ll see all of that touched upon throughout the course of the series. In my hands though, “continuity” is going to mean: this is what I grew up knowing, and this is what, arguably, a huge percentage of the reading populace knows – in other terms, the old fart audience.

NRAMA: I think you mean “casual reader.”

AR: Yes – the more casual reader. I do love continuity in part, but I find it completely frustrating to try and find my way into it and become a part of it. I could never make it work with either publisher to get close enough to it. You’ve got different hands working on different pieces. Say, you’re Grant Morrison, and you just took over Justice League. You put the classic team back together. Superman is a key figure in that team, and a key part of your stories. One year in, you get the call and DC tells you Superman is blue and electric – make it work with your plan.

That’s the kind of aggravating thing that I guess I’m too uptight to work with. So, as a result, I become less willing to compromise in that way, and opt for the classic takes on the characters and I’ll do my thing somewhere set apart from the larger universe.

NRAMA: So as a creator, if you can step outside of the tight continuity, you can have the flexibility you mentioned, and you don’t have to worry about Bobby Ewing coming out of the shower four months later…

AR: Right. And also, you have a greater chance of being recognized for having produced a piece of artwork, essentially. The story itself can stand on its own in a way that can be pointed out later, like Dark Knight or Watchmen, or a handful of others. That’s not to say that there aren’t good, classic stories that are written “in continuity,” it’s just that, by working where I like to work, I don’t have to worry about anything down the road affecting my story, or having my story be impacted by something I never intended to add in, or saw playing any kind of role in it.

NRAMA: So your Superman in Justice isn’t blue?

AR: Only his costume – and in the right places. In the last few years, the only thing of this type though – the extra-continuity work – has been New Frontier. I’m hoping that we could qualify in some fashion, not just as an entertaining long series, but also hit the marks of saying something, if not something damned important about the characters, at least something that bears longer inspection over time, rather than being a part of one fleeting moment in history.

NRAMA: Well, with that as the high-falootin’ ideal of what you’re looking to do, how do you bring that down into 12 issues of a bi-monthly comic series with people in costumes?

AR: As it was, I was finishing up work on my Justice League book when I first started talking with Dan DiDio about the idea of a Justice League comic book that could be a series. Something with the classic JLA, so, in a way to satisfy those consumers of DC products who want those characters. The first name for the series, actually was going to be Justice – there hasn’t been any change in that. I felt that the JLA book, Liberty and Justice led in nicely to something just called Justice.

I talked up the idea of bringing over the Paradise X team, because we were finishing that up simultaneously at Marvel, and I thought it would be wonderful to keep things going, from working on the story with Jim to having Doug involved, perhaps even more than he was in the Marvel projects.

NRAMA: What was the early response from DC when you pitched the idea?

AR: There was initial interest from Dan – and this was long before the All-Star line had been conceived or talked about, so, in its infancy, I would’ve been doing my typical Earth X thing, which would have been covers, designs, and co-plotting, but not really treating it as my baby. I’ve had other projects that I’ve looked forward to doing, some in the mainstream and some in independent land, but when I hit upon the idea of what a series like this could do – telling of the ultimate superhero battle of the Legion of Doom versus the Justice League, I realized that I really wanted to be involved with the day to day proceedings of the artwork.

NRAMA: And that’s where you and Doug figured out your partnership?

AR: Yeah. Knowing that it would be such a long series, the idea of combining my stuff with Doug’s stood out as a really exciting prospect of something that I’d never tried before. I got really psyched about the whole thing – I could keep my hand in, and it will look like my work but with a slight difference when it’s all said and done. Honestly, I feel like the largest back-breaking effort is on Dougie’s head at this point. He has to draw the buildings! Buildings are not fun to draw. Layout’s not so bad, until you have to start to draw it up on the page, and certain things are just damn boring.

That said, I’m thrilled when I get the pages, and it’s clear that Doug has put all this insane effort into them. This way, I can concentrate on color and painting, and expand that part of myself, as well as go in and tweak elements so everything looks consistent.

NRAMA: Since this project was announced, there’ve been a few comments of this being yet another chance for you to re-create the Superfriends in your image. So you see that as…accurate? Spiteful?

AR: The thing about a whole superhero team versus supervillain team battle isn’t just about doing a send-up of the Superfriends. The history of JLA stories is largely not this kind of thing – there are conflicts over the course of time with groups of supervillains, but very seldom has it been that team of all-star supervillains, where you’ve got the top guys together. Many times, you’ve got the ne’er do wells rather than the real supervillains teaming up to fight the League – the Tattooed Man, Chronos, and a few pals decide to take on the Justice League for a little while. Not the best and brightest of the supervillain set, and they would get what was coming to them.

Even in the Secret Society of Super Villains, you never got the full-on battle between them and the Justice League that everyone dreamed of. There was a little here and there, but never anything where you had a team of villains lead by the Brainiac-Luthor team, with Sinestro, Captain Cold, Bizarro, Grodd, and everyone’s arch nemesis put into play. Re-examining this, and coming to it as a fan, and asking what else I would want this to be? You want the Joker in there somewhere…and the best supervillains. Probably you want to stop just short of putting Darkseid in there. I filled out the group by bringing Captain Marvel into the Justice League set, so I brought in Black Adam.

NRAMA: This goes back to your view of the larger version of the DCU than you’ve played with before, right?

AR: Right – you’re going to see Black Adam, and you’re going to see more members of other teams. The Marvel Family shows up, as I said. The Metal Men, the Teen Titans, the Doom Patrol. They’re all in there. Well, we haven’t figured it all out exactly, but they’re going to be in there.

NRAMA: You mean Jim could be reading this now, thinking, “Oh…wait…what?”

AR: [laughs] No – he knows it’s coming, and he knows how to cram so it doesn’t look like cramming. We know how to pack it all in, but the problem is we have the desire to pack it all in, which means occasionally, we can completely confound the readers with too many distracting characters and subplots. Our commitment to our readership is to do a better job than we’ve done before with this – hopefully make it succinct and focused. Still accomplish all the things we want to do as fanboys – to play with all the toys in the sandbox, but to do it in a way where readers don’t switch to glassy-eyes stares and stop reading the words mid-issue.

Check back Monday for part 2 of our talk with Alex Ross about Justice.

In Part One of our talk with Alex Ross about the upcoming Justice 12-issue series, we discussed the series’ origins, its setting, its characters, and battles. In our conclusion, it’s time to get down to the nitty-gritty of working specifics, Ross’ view of the era he chooses to work in, and if he will ever be over this Superfriends thing he has.

Newsarama: Talking about Jim now – how does the collaboration between the two of you work? The two of you bash out a rough plot, and then Jim comes back with a script?

Alex Ross: Yep. That’s basically it. Jim has produced an outline for the series as a whole, based on our lengthy conversations and going over details in meticulous fashion. I give him additional notes based on that, and then, once he’s written a script for a particular issue, I give him copious notes on everything that I felt needed to be covered. Usually, we have a long list of those things, so they’re already down for him to attend to. I might disagree with him, for example, on how he conveyed one or some of those things, so we’ll talk some more, and maybe some more changes will be made to find the middle ground between the two of us. Finally, we get tot the final draft, it goes to the editor, and then, of course, we get some more notes that change things again, and then it gets to Doug.

It’s not exactly a fast system we’ve got going down here, but because it’s not exactly a monthly, we’re still ahead of the curve. We’ve been working on this awhile, and things should speed up as we really get into it.

NRAMA: You said that you wanted take this “extra-continuity” snapshot of the particular characters at a specific point in time – let’s hit some characters at random. Superman, for example – in this story, he’s not the greenhorn here…

AR: No, no, no. To be very true to it, it’s keeping things with where I wanted to set them, they’re in this place which is a combination of the continuity of the comics and what was on television back in the ‘70s or so. As such, the perpetual state of the characters then reflects where they are in Justice – the unmarried Superman, for instance. Lois Lane is a part of this as well – she’s the focused love interest in his life, and even though she’s not his wife in this, there is that bond that is there.

Dick Grayson is Robin in this, and there are no other Teen Titans, save the originals: Wonder Girl, Aqua Lad, Speedy, Kid Flash. That doesn’t mean I don’t love the Perez/Wolfman ones, but that’s just a different age. The cutoff for me is about when the first modern-age hero is introduced to the Justice League, who I consider to be Firestorm.

NRAMA: Not Zatanna?

AR: No – she was around at the same time as Firestorm, that’s true, but she had appeared in the ‘60s, and was established as a guest star/friend/adjunct member by then. Likewise, Elongated Man may have become a regular member in the ‘70s, but he was already making his regular appearances in the Justice League comics of the late ‘60s, so there’s a longstanding history of a character like that in this entourage.

Also, for me, it’s important to pick this time in history, before they started killing people willy-nilly. Once you start making that alteration, which I think was around 1976 – 1977, wherein months of each other you’re killing off Aquaman’s infant son, Flash’s wife, and some others, things start to definitely change.

NRAMA: How do you mean? Obviously, as your work shows, together with Firestorm joining the League, this era of deaths that you mention are almost a wall that you tend not to go past…

AR: It was a heartbreaking period for me as a kid, because I first started getting my DC comics around that time, when I was six or seven. I got one issue of Adventure Comics, where Aquaman has this cute little family – his sidekick, his wife, his son who’s dressed like him. At that age, I thought that was the cutest little thing, and then the next issue I get; Black Manta has killed the kid. I was shocked – I mean – you couldn’t just do that, could you? This guy was on television – you don’t kill the families of people who are on television! I know some people are getting up in arms about DC killing heroes and characters now, but they were making commitments even back then that they would never walk back from.

In a way, Justice is capturing a purity of a specific time period that happens to coincide with my youth, and that of others, before it was destroyed, and the DCU moved on.

NRAMA: Thoughts on the versions from this era you’re talking about versus what has come after and the versions we have now?

AR: I really don’t want to get too much into that, but, for example, I would say there’s value in the idea of Aquaman being the parable of the superhero father, just like Reed Richards is to Marvel. Flash is, in many ways, the parable of the superhero husband. But obviously, you could say that it’s the same of Hawkman or Hawkgirl, but that’s more the parable of the superhero couple. The superhero Romeo and Juliet is more Green Arrow and Black Canary. You get the idea. I always appreciated the simple takes on those characters which was always exemplified by them having those extended family members.

Those changes that took them away from that were only made because they felt the books were not competing well enough, and needed to be kicked in the ass. For years then, they would kick somebody so hard, trying desperately to make someone more attractive to people so as to break them. Ultimately, the break was too much for some, as with the Flash, where the “break” which saw Iris killed led, pretty directly to his death in 1985. He was so broken that they needed to start from scratch. I would call that the failure of creativity, to not make these characters work better, and not know how to make them sell on their own. They were looking at trying to compete with Spider-Man, Wolverine, and the X-Men, and were trying to fix things with some fairly radical approaches.

NRAMA: So, by taking the “snapshot” of these characters at this point in time, you’re looking at them in their iconic forms, rather than say, Grant Morrison’s approach of the major heroes of the DCU as gods – as you see them, the versions in Justice are very much humans who are also heroes?

AR: Yeah, pretty much.

NRAMA: So flipping the coin, let’s talk about the villains. We’re you doing a similar process with them, in regards to capturing them in their “classic” form from this particular time period?

AR: Somewhat, although with some, it was harder than just saying, “It’s him from right about then.” Let me give you a really weird idea with this. You find these really weird compromises in history. I wanted to represent all the characters in the Legion of Doom, pretty much exactly as they were, and I was adding tot eh list, but I was going to include all 13 original members - even ones that, when you examine them closely, don’t bear up to being in the group terrible well. Case in point: Toyman, who was, in effect, the Joker of the group for the cartoon show. Here’s this old Superman villain, who was only the guy in that spandex outfit for a very short period of time in the ‘70s, where he took over the role from the original Toyman, who was the portly guy. The new guy winds up getting killed by the original in the comics by the late ‘70s. So, before the decade was even out, that character, as shown, was gone for good.

So, the thought is, here he’s somewhat “eternal” because of this version that was appearing on television, as well as it being the only time Toyman was a costume character. So, to represent him, without pinpointing that this is all about the ‘70s and trying to keep it more or less timeless, the Toyman becomes a character who’s about representation through the toys being robot emissaries of his. So why not have this figure that’s much like a marionette that has that same costumed Toyman effectively, who is the robot emissary of the heavier-set classic version, who’s behind the scenes controlling these things via remote.

So, we had to pick some middle ground where Justice would be between all these things, trying to find in a way, a “new” classic version that encapsulates where I think these things need to stand in history. That’s the sort of take I was doing on every character and thing – finding out what version of the character it is that stands the test of time, or is able to walk this very fine line between all these various versions.

One of the weird things going on with our series is that we’re fortunate we’re getting rolling this summer, just before the new Justice League Unlimited cartoon series starts up with their new episodes by early next year, as they’ve been working on a long storyline that’s effectively doing exactly what we’re doing – the Legion of Doom versus the Justice League.

It was aggravating working along and not knowing what they’re doing, but now that I do know, there are ideas that we’ve crossed over on. I wanted to establish, for example, a connection between Gorilla Grodd and Giganta, because she was supposed to be a gorilla originally. Then, I watched the show one time last year, where they did exactly that. I’ve no idea what they’re doing in Villains United, and I’m scared to at this point, for fear that some of the other ideas we’d been developing made it into their story as well.

NRAMA: Are you finding that with the drumbeat to Infinite Crisis, a lot of the characteristics you’ve cited are coming back to the forefront of the DCU? After all, Identity Crisis, one of the major start points to Infinite Crisis was rooted in a certain “generation” of characters that were just a little downstream of yours…

AR: A little. I didn’t have many comics as a kid, but the specific issues I got all influenced a lot of things, not just myself and my own personal tastes, but a lot of what seems to be going on now. For example, I had one odd issue of the second half of the Secret Society of Super-Villains story where the members of the Society stole the minds of the JLA. That’s a perfect example of how to point out how there was never this great group of supervillains that went up against the JLA – look at that group, for instance: the Wizard, the Floronic Man, Blockbuster – these were B-listers.

NRAMA: Who got lucky…?

AR: Yeah – exactly. That always made me wonder why it was never like it was on the cartoon show? The new cartoon show is getting around to it now, the main DC Universe looks to be getting around to it now, and we’re getting around to it now. But for the longest time, you had maybe one top-flight guy among some other, really bad villains – Luthor leading a bunch of guys who had no hope in hell of defeating two heroes working together, let alone the full-on JLA. It was like they never conceived a way to put the biggest guys together at one time.

NRAMA: In putting the story together – as you’ve moved through the storyline, have there been any characters that have come out more strongly to you that you didn’t think would have such major roles, or is everyone fitting in where you thought they would fit?

AR: Well, I’m only in the middle of the third issue, but Jim has written up through issue #6 so far. It’s operating in a lot of ways exactly as we expected where, for example, Brainiac is going to come across as incredibly creepy, because I’m having him focus more on the idea of the “brain” part of the name. He’s a character that, as a robot life form, is fascinated with that which he can’t control easily, which would be the human mind. So what’s to say he’s not popping heads open, digging around in cadavers, and studying the brain. It’s something terribly horrifying to see him wearing a blood-soaked smock, so to speak. We’ve take a tact with him that he’s very much characterized like Agent Smith was in The Matrix films: Cold, dispassionate, cruel, but…insatiably curious about that which he cannot be or completely control.

As far as other characters becoming appealing, one way the series will resonate with people hopefully is that each issue will focus on one member of the team. The first issue is very concentrated around Aquaman, and you’ll see a one-on-one fight between him and Black Manta in there. The second issue is Batman’s issue – you’ve got to throw out your big guns right away.

NRAMA: Huh? But Aquaman is in issue #1…

AR: Alright – it was probably my ego that led us all there, but I wanted to get away with making the first issue of a new series focused on Aquaman and make it work. But you get Batman and the Riddler in issue #2, and then Martian Manhunter and Gorilla Grodd in #3. You see many of the mother members making their points throughout the story, but it’s a slow buildup of everything building towards the revelation of what the plot is against the world and the heroes, and then, ultimately, what will lead to the war, where it’s a big free-for-all, with every single character on stage at the same time. What I know from the scripts we’ve gotten through now, Captain Marvel/Shazam will come in out of the blue to become a very pivotal character, because he is sort of that outside member of the DC heroes.

NRAMA: Give the “era” you’re looking to capture in the story, how does Shazam fit in?

AR: Well, he obviously wasn’t a member of the Justice League, but expanded on that level of DC icons, I want him to be very much in the middle of this, and to show a synthesis of all these important worlds of DC’s ownership. It’s just like with Plastic Man – he’ll come in and play an important role as well. So far in the story, we’ve got him appearing on billboards as a corporate spokesman, and we’re slowly squeaking in elements of other characters before they finally have an onstage presence with every page.

It’s meant to be this very thought-out story that’s taking the ramifications of what a lot of what these heroes and villains can do very seriously, so that for each moment you’re soaking them in, the story is adding a new level of their complexity or their deadliness – and also establishing some of their lives in this too.

NRAMA: Obviously, since this series has been announced, and even before it was announced, it was thought and assumed that it would be part of the All Star line, as it is, in essence, an “All Star” version of the JLA…

AR: You would think that, wouldn’t you?

NRAMA: … Anything else you want to say?

AR: Not really.

NRAMA: Okay then, speaking of those earlier days of the series, this was originally to have been called Versus, correct?

AR: Right, but as we were working through that, it was pointed out that Upper Deck has a card game with the same title, and we couldn’t call our series that. As irony would have it, I didn’t he art for both of their boxes premiering this year, for both the JLA and Avengers sets that are coming. It’s a shame, because when you hear the name “Versus,’ and see who we’re talking about, you completely know from the instant you see it what the story will be about. It was perfect clarity in a title, but oh well.

NRAMA: Finally then, once you put down your brush on the last panel of Justice #12 in just under two years from now, if your schedule holds, will that be if for you and the Superfriends? Will have you gotten this out of your system by them?

AR: My God, I hope so, but knowing me, I’m such a lifelong fan; I’ll probably never get it out of my system completely. I can at least promise that I will take a very long break from doing those characters. It’s not like I don’t like other things in comics, so it’s anyone’s guess as to where I’d go next, but you would hope that at that point, I’ve had my fill of drawing these giant group shots of the JLA. Year after year, I produce those images…but when you love something, that love just lives on and on, so….they’ll be there somewhere in the future, I’m sure, but yeah, 12 issues of Justice is going to go a long way towards scratching the Superfriends itch.